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Misbehaving chatbots could be kept in check with personality tests

Artificial intelligence chatbots need to work on their social judgment, recent events suggest. At one end of the spectrum, they’re facing lawsuits for recommending dangerous actions. At the other end, the models can be so nice they’re considered sycophantic.

The problem could get worse as AI bots work more with humans, such as handling customer complaints, says Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

But help may be on the way. In new research, Leng has devised a sort of personality test—more precisely, a behavioral audit —for large language models (LLMs), the technology that drives products such as ChatGPT. The paper is published in the journal Information Systems Research.

Webb reveals black hole that formed before its galaxy

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.

But it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.

Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.

Freeze-dried reagents and hand-powered hardware bring biomanufacturing to remote labs

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, working with collaborators around the world, have demonstrated the effectiveness of a suite of low-cost, portable biotechnology tools designed to improve access to laboratory research and diagnostics in resource-limited settings.

Published in Science Advances, the study highlights how decentralized biomanufacturing tools and freeze-dried reagents can help researchers produce high-value biological materials locally—reducing reliance on fragile international supply chains and expanding access to life sciences innovation globally.

The research was led by Keith Pardee, associate professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, alongside collaborators including Camila González in Bogotá, Colombia, Fernán Federici in Santiago, Chile, and Lindomar Pena in Recife, Brazil.

‘Atom Camera’ maps laser light at nanoscale using a single ultracold atom

A research group led by Assistant Professor Takafumi Tomita and Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, has developed a new microscopy technique called the Atom Camera, which uses a single ultracold atom at near absolute zero temperature trapped in an optical tweezer as a camera to visualize the intensity and polarization distributions of light at the nanometer (one-millionth of a millimeter) scale.

In this study, a single atom trapped by optical tweezer was successfully utilized as a scanning probe for imaging the fine structures of intensity and polarization distributions of light patterns with a spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit of conventional optical microscopes. The results are published in Nature Communications.

ChatGPT share links abused to host fake outage pages to deliver malware

Threat actors are abusing ChatGPT’s content-sharing feature to display fake OpenAI outage pages that direct users to download malware disguised as the ChatGPT desktop application.

The “LLMShare” campaign, discovered by Push Security, uses Google ads to direct users searching for ChatGPT to a malicious shared ChatGPT page hosted on chatgpt.com, allowing the attack to be delivered through a legitimate OpenAI domain.

Users who click the advertisement are taken to a legitimate ChatGPT shared page, but instead of seeing a chat conversation, they are presented with a rendered outage notice claiming the web version is unavailable and that they should download the desktop application instead.

From $5 Attacks to Botnet-Powered Platforms: Inside the DDoS-as-a- Service Market

DDoS attacks are increasingly being sold like subscription services, complete with pricing tiers, support, and reseller programs. Flare explores how the DDoS-as-a-Service market has evolved from scattered tools into polished attack platforms.

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